Animated!

A year or so ago, I had the chance to collaborate with the supremely talented illustrator Edmund Currie on a project called Gruesome Yarns for ImproMafia. Naturally I jumped at the prospect of working with him again on a new project for ImproMafia.

Animated! is ImproMafia’s feature show at the 2018 Brisbane Comedy Festival. Running nightly from Tuesday 13 March through Sunday 18 March at Brisbane City Hall, each night improvisers will take the audience’s everyday problems and turn them in to a completely improvised adults-only parody of classic animated movies.

Now… How do you convey an event like this in a photograph? How about we take real-life people and have them morph in to perfect animated characters? I think yes.

Step 1 – the real people. Brittany, Drew, Amy and Wade from ImproMafia got in to character as plausible real-life people, ready to be transformed!

Now, the really magical part of this shoot is all about Edmund’s work. It was so much fun getting to watch him go through stages to build this image – from basic sketches, refining the line work, paint work, and ultimately shading. Usually putting a photograph together is a solo effort; sending files back and forth in to the wee hours and seeing it all come together was incredible.

Overlaying Edmund’s hand-drawn outlines with the photo, and gradually revealing them by sketching with a stylus, is about the closest I’ll ever get to being able to draw.

The final product looks amazing! And it meets the brief perfectly. Both briefs actually… the client brief, and our own mission to make sure any image that appears in a festival programme looks very different from all the others. Mission accomplished I think!